Linux vs. Windows: What's The Difference?

underpar writes "This zdnet article covering Microsoft's Tech Ed conference quotes one of the speakers, Mark Russinovich, as saying that Linux is becoming more and more like Windows. He cites many examples of where Linux 'copies' Windows and other operating systems. He says the only current difference is 'how windowing is handled.'"

Comments

Windows copies OS/2.

[www.sorehands.com]

OS/2 2.0 has much of the stuff that Windos 98/2000 had before they had it.

There is only one program that has ever been written from scratch -- "Hello World.". Everything else is just cut and past from that.

Re:An important difference

[JKR]

Here's your loop; run along now.

for /L %I in (1,1,10) do @echo %I

Jon.

Re:It's a vicious cycle

[plj]

Mark Russinovich is a known pro-windows guy, whose views are for sure heavily biased. Kudos for him though, that he really knows his OS inside out - he is one of the guys behind Sysinternals, and I've more than once found their tools very helpful when dealing with problems of Windows boxes.

Despite his talk being biased, I think he got one important point mostly right:

But ultimately, said Russinovich, the gap between the two operating systems will continue to narrow to a point where their underlying kernel becomes irrelevant. "Layered services will become more important," he concluded.

On server space the kernel performance probably counts out more, but at least for most (not all, though) desktop users the kernel really isn't the most important part; it is the common APIs that do the trick. One could build two very similar boxes, one running Linux and the other FreeBSD - both running same apps, with differences hardly noticeable for the end user. Switch the BSD box to Mach kernel, keep userland, and still no much difference. But then just throw Apple's Quartz instead of X on top of that, and we suddenly have totally different world! This is just because we'll now suddenly have a totally different set of APIs.

However - what Russinovich left out - Windows will inevitably be the very last one to jump on this bandvagon, due to Microsoft's policies' closed nature and it's dominant position on the market. Windows just does not have to be compatible with other systems on the market the same way POSIX systems does have to - not at least from it's vendor's viewpoint.

Re:The Difference

[mattACK]

You shouldn't be administering any server without the proper knowledge. Any system which crashes regularly has something wrong with it which is your problem to fix. Windows, BSD, Linux, or Palm: misconfiguation == doom.

I didn't mean that to be impugning your abilities, but consider it.

Re:An important difference

[Stinking Pig]

I understand your point, but I will note that the free desktop customizers I've tried have not been stable, and I'm too cheap to plunk down money hoping that the non-free version is better.

Additionally, I assume you're referring to SFU or Cygwin when you say you can get real shells on Windows, and there the difference is obvious as soon as you try some filesystem access. Permission thunking between NTFS ACLs and Unix-style perms slows it all down quite a bit, and the funny mounting stuff isn't bulletproof.

My day to be pedantic, I guess.

Re:An important difference

[sg_oneill]

Windows is more expensive to maintain as it requires more work, has been shown in some studies to be more difficult to use by beginners (gnome) and attracts less qualified IT staff. There? How does that grab ya?